The depressing results of its own game's day one piracy rates show that only 6.4% of people playing the game bought it legitimately.

Jesus Christ and people wonder why crippling DRM is included in PC games

I never heard of the game or its studio. I've heard of Pirate Bay. If I see a game at the top of the download list, but have never heard of it or its studio, downloading the game to try it out is pretty common, especially when it's the developers that put it on there. But if gameplay is crippled by an intentional bug (and I'm given no clue that the bug exists on purpose), I'll either assume the same bug exists on the retail copy and not purchase it, or assume the developers were being dicks and not purchase it. Plus there's no way to know if that 6.4% actually pirated it first before purchasing.

Pirate Bay can be a great way to advertise your stuff, provided you embrace them and not try to screw them.

Let's wait for it to hit Steam (another article said it was on greenlight) before judging the sales.

"If years down the track you wonder why there are no games like these anymore and all you get to play is pay-to-play and social games designed to suck money out of your pockets then the reason will stare back at you in the mirror," warns Klugg, on a to specifically target people looking for a cracked version, asking them nicely to reconsider.

The future may be better than this guy's predicting: kickstarter and crowdfunding may lead to the democratization of game dev, where games that get made are the ones that the public actually wants to play (and therefore fund) as opposed to whatever dreck the corporate types decide to shovel out. If that's the case, then this may be a further way of limiting the destructive effects of endemic piracy since studios get paid up front to make a game.

Unfortunately, kickstarter projects top out at ~$2M, which is not enough cash to make anything more than small scope games. Most of the titles I've worked on have been (based on public comments from the studio head) $5-10M and even that felt constrained while working on the project.

In most cases that I'm aware of, a game dev studio hits kickstarter to get the last few M to get the project out the door, after already investing everything they can in it. Of course, this means that if the kickstarter fails, then the company goes under. So maybe not much is going to change there, either.

Regardless, people will always come up with some excuse to not pay for the games they play.

Most popular game in the universe for most of the 90s. EVERYBODY had the shareware version. The full version and DOOM2 were probably the most pirated software in the world from '93 to '96. No copy protection at ALL - got four or five floppy discs? ARJ that sucker up and have fun!

Yet id still made an unholy assload of money off it.

Piracy hurts, sure, but it doesn't kill.

/Man, I'm having flashbacks to the ASCII loading screens for some reason...

The depressing results of its own game's day one piracy rates show that only 6.4% of people playing the game bought it legitimately.

Jesus Christ and people wonder why crippling DRM is included in PC games

I never heard of the game or its studio. I've heard of Pirate Bay. If I see a game at the top of the download list, but have never heard of it or its studio, downloading the game to try it out is pretty common, especially when it's the developers that put it on there. But if gameplay is crippled by an intentional bug (and I'm given no clue that the bug exists on purpose), I'll either assume the same bug exists on the retail copy and not purchase it, or assume the developers were being dicks and not purchase it. Plus there's no way to know if that 6.4% actually pirated it first before purchasing.

Pirate Bay can be a great way to advertise your stuff, provided you embrace them and not try to screw them.

Let's wait for it to hit Steam (another article said it was on greenlight) before judging the sales.

Its always funny with devs do that, the meta-irony of this particular one is great. This isn't the sort of game I think I'd like or buy in the first place but yah I'm kinda done with the whole downloading them off torrent sites thing too, there's too many good games that I want to support and pay for to bother stealing the latest Madden's call of honour XXVI that I know I wouldn't even play due to how bland it is.

Having said that: Unknown company releasing a product with no ability to demo it first? You got exactly what you deserve.

Most popular game in the universe for most of the 90s. EVERYBODY had the shareware version. The full version and DOOM2 were probably the most pirated software in the world from '93 to '96. No copy protection at ALL - got four or five floppy discs? ARJ that sucker up and have fun!

Yet id still made an unholy assload of money off it.

Piracy hurts, sure, but it doesn't kill.

/Man, I'm having flashbacks to the ASCII loading screens for some reason...

Back then it was a little harder to mass-distribute the ill-gotten warez. For every dorm floor that had one legit copy spread around to a dozen friend there were significant amount of homes that bought it because that's what you do to get games when you aren't a BBSing/newsgroup surfin' cyber-nerd. These days it just takes one ass with a net connection to upload one copy and it spreads like wildfire. Also back then there wasn't such an culture where every app/song/game/site is free (in either as beer or as it sells you as its product) and the idea of paying for anything is just straight up alien.

Most popular game in the universe for most of the 90s. EVERYBODY had the shareware version. The full version and DOOM2 were probably the most pirated software in the world from '93 to '96. No copy protection at ALL - got four or five floppy discs? ARJ that sucker up and have fun!

Yet id still made an unholy assload of money off it.

Piracy hurts, sure, but it doesn't kill.

/Man, I'm having flashbacks to the ASCII loading screens for some reason...

Also Minecraft. Estimates are that it's around a 70% piracy rate, but Notch doesn't care at all. Those 30% are more important to him. And he's still making money hand over fist.

"Piracy will win in the long run. It has to. The alternative is too scary."-Notch

So a game that isn't on Steam (the single largest PC game distributor) has a low number of paying customers?

I'm shocked, shocked by this news. I'm also equally shocked that someone expected people to pay for yet-another-crappy tycoon game that you'd swear was shiat out of some "Tycoon toolkit" because there are a plethora of equally shiat tycoon games that have appeared recently.

Perhaps this guy needs to go talk to the two who made Space, Pirates and Zombies. They'll tell you a lovely tale about Impulse vs Steam and how that correlates to both piracy and number of sales, the 'tldr' being: Get you game on Steam before biatching about either.

I haven't played a pirated game in years and years, love steam and the sales. I"ve come to some conclusions about games in judging whether they're worth playing. Have a demo? No, then highly likely a piece of garbage (see Simcity, LOTR3, many others). Cost more than $50 & not one of the most anticipated AAA titles? No, then the studio thinks too highly of themselves and wait 3 months for it to be in the $5 sale-bin. Cost more than $50 & a highly anticipated AAA title? yes, then wait 8-12 months for a $15-20 sale and let all the bugs work out.

My last game purchase was cities in motion for $15, it is a GREAT game by a great small studio.

BumpInTheNight:Back then it was a little harder to mass-distribute the ill-gotten warez.

Easier actually IMHO. These days you need to know places like TPB exist, you need to know you need a torrent client and so on. Exact same thing really for newsgroups before people say it.

In days of old you'd simply send a SAE with a floppy disk on it to an advert in the back of a newspaper (national at that) and it'd reappear with their price list on it a few days later. After that you just order what you want and pay the guy with a cheque.

If that was too much like hard work you could go to the local market or car boot sale and you'd find someone selling copies of 'Photoshop' or similar that weren't on disks that'd been written on with a sharpie.

Later on in the late 90's when CD's became cheaper you'd find bundles that themselves had brand names, things like the 'Blobby' series (names after Mr. Blobby a character from a UK TV show of the time) were very popular.

"Unfortunately, kickstarter projects top out at ~$2M, which is not enough cash to make anything more than small scope games. Most of the titles I've worked on have been (based on public comments from the studio head) $5-10M and even that felt constrained while working on the project.

In most cases that I'm aware of, a game dev studio hits kickstarter to get the last few M to get the project out the door, after already investing everything they can in it. Of course, this means that if the kickstarter fails, then the company goes under. So maybe not much is going to change there, either."

Did you miss the part where the kickstarter for the sequel to Privateer cleared 9 million dollars? While true, the money was gathered through campaigns both on their website and on kickstarter, the money is definitely out there to fund large projects.

I feel sorry for game devs, but not sorry enough to buy a game infected with DRM. Of course, that means I don't get to play many big-studio games but there are so many excellent non-DRM games out there that I don't even notice.

Vaneshi:BumpInTheNight:Back then it was a little harder to mass-distribute the ill-gotten warez.

Easier actually IMHO. These days you need to know places like TPB exist, you need to know you need a torrent client and so on. Exact same thing really for newsgroups before people say it.

In days of old you'd simply send a SAE with a floppy disk on it to an advert in the back of a newspaper (national at that) and it'd reappear with their price list on it a few days later. After that you just order what you want and pay the guy with a cheque.

If that was too much like hard work you could go to the local market or car boot sale and you'd find someone selling copies of 'Photoshop' or similar that weren't on disks that'd been written on with a sharpie.

Later on in the late 90's when CD's became cheaper you'd find bundles that themselves had brand names, things like the 'Blobby' series (names after Mr. Blobby a character from a UK TV show of the time) were very popular.

And that's without BBS's (which really were tiny).

Okay okay easier as in less smarts needed to do it, but in terms of sheer laziness neither of those trump the concept of:overhearing someone mention TPB in person or on a forum like you just didvisit the site and learn you need a piece of freeware to use it, download said freeware.permanent & instant access to the internet's finest stolen goods, as quick to use as your internet connection.(elapsed time: 5-10 minutes for a savvy user who likely already did this when they were 12, maybe a half hour for an unsavvy user and depending on how fast they realize they have to DL the MacOS versions of everything)

On the note of laziness I think the online game purchase companies managed to get me because unlike some seeds they always had awesome download speeds and I didn't have to fret about with crap like patches vs cracks for them and all the rest of the song & dance around skirting newer forms of DRM. Laziness for the win :P

I'm surprised the developer was proactive enough to bother to do all this shiat considering it's usually them that gets screwed by the publisher. I guess they're starting to sympathize with their captors.

BumpInTheNight:Its always funny with devs do that, the meta-irony of this particular one is great. This isn't the sort of game I think I'd like or buy in the first place but yah I'm kinda done with the whole downloading them off torrent sites thing too, there's too many good games that I want to support and pay for to bother stealing the latest Madden's call of honour XXVI that I know I wouldn't even play due to how bland it is.

Having said that: Unknown company releasing a product with no ability to demo it first? You got exactly what you deserve.

DemonEater: You guys remember DOOM?

Most popular game in the universe for most of the 90s. EVERYBODY had the shareware version. The full version and DOOM2 were probably the most pirated software in the world from '93 to '96. No copy protection at ALL - got four or five floppy discs? ARJ that sucker up and have fun!

Yet id still made an unholy assload of money off it.

Piracy hurts, sure, but it doesn't kill.

/Man, I'm having flashbacks to the ASCII loading screens for some reason...

Back then it was a little harder to mass-distribute the ill-gotten warez. For every dorm floor that had one legit copy spread around to a dozen friend there were significant amount of homes that bought it because that's what you do to get games when you aren't a BBSing/newsgroup surfin' cyber-nerd. These days it just takes one ass with a net connection to upload one copy and it spreads like wildfire. Also back then there wasn't such an culture where every app/song/game/site is free (in either as beer or as it sells you as its product) and the idea of paying for anything is just straight up alien.

Leisure suit Larry at one point held the record for being massively pirated

Vaneshi:These days you need to know places like TPB exist, you need to know you need a torrent client and so on. Exact same thing really for newsgroups before people say it.

Only now all you need to do is type 'fee [name of game]' into a search engine and you can find sites for this, or people giving instructions to TPB, plus numerous how to guides. I lost my copy of Final Fire Pro, and within 15 minutes I had a copy with and english translation patch. No need to check ads in a paper or send a SAE to anyone.

I wouldn't say harder, but if you don't know what your doing there are certainly more risks involved in terms of malware.

scottydoesntknow:"Piracy will win in the long run. It has to. The alternative is too scary."-Notch

The article he wrote about that was using piracy more to explain it as a digital distribution service, and that in the long run people will need to think around that by providing services that would require the game to connect online to the game server to give a reason for people to actually purchase the game. One example he used was online saving, and there are people who would consider that to be DRM.

Regardless of the data he used (yeah, TPB and torrents are a larger distribution network than his website, I don't think that proves much until he adds his game to a similarly large distribution network) the responses players had to their fake studios game being pirated are great.

Number of games I pirated before Steam: most of the ones I wanted to playNumber of games I pirated since Steam: Zero. None. Nada.Number of games I bought on steam sales for $5: ALL OF THE DAMN THINGS

Make your content available easily and cheaply, and people will throw money at you rather than go through the hassles of piracy.

/I'm up to Fallout New Vegas now. Should get to games from 2012 by the end of the year.

This. Really, if I want a game bad enough, I will pay the full price and have at it. If not, I just wait for GOTY editions and/or sales on Steam.

Seconded. Times are hard. Most of the people that are at an age where they've been gamers all their lives, and that are most likely to know how to pirate things (13 year olds with mommy and daddy's disposable income that only know how to turn on their console and put games in don't count), don't have a whole lot of money to throw around for entertainment. Of course, the right thing to do would just be to go without, but wanting the shiniest, newest games to take your mind off of the bombings, shootings, and other crap that goes on almost every day...well, it's human.

Jacking prices up, nickel-and-diming bullshiat, and screwing over paying customers with spyware and massive inconvenience is not the way to stop that. Offering good value and a worthwhile service is the way to open wallets. I can't even remember the last time I pre-ordered a game, but a free copy of the original BioShock and XCOM Enemy Unknown sold me on BioShock Infinite (which was quite good). And c'mon, Empire Total War for $2.50? I almost dread the big Steam sales because I know I'll wind up spending waaaaaaay more than I ever should.

Steam is doing it right. EA and Activision are swimming upstream, and if they don't knock it off, they're going under. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but eventually.

bennett311:This. Really, if I want a game bad enough, I will pay the full price and have at it. If not, I just wait for GOTY editions and/or sales on Steam.

shiat; I wait for GOTY/steam sales now largely because of DLC.

fark you, game devs. I want to play the entire game once (maybe 2-3 times if it's f'ing awesome) and I want to play the ENTIRE game then. Not in little 10 minute DLC expansions spread over a damn year.

BumpInTheNight:Vaneshi: BumpInTheNight:Back then it was a little harder to mass-distribute the ill-gotten warez.

Easier actually IMHO. These days you need to know places like TPB exist, you need to know you need a torrent client and so on. Exact same thing really for newsgroups before people say it.

In days of old you'd simply send a SAE with a floppy disk on it to an advert in the back of a newspaper (national at that) and it'd reappear with their price list on it a few days later. After that you just order what you want and pay the guy with a cheque.

If that was too much like hard work you could go to the local market or car boot sale and you'd find someone selling copies of 'Photoshop' or similar that weren't on disks that'd been written on with a sharpie.

Later on in the late 90's when CD's became cheaper you'd find bundles that themselves had brand names, things like the 'Blobby' series (names after Mr. Blobby a character from a UK TV show of the time) were very popular.

And that's without BBS's (which really were tiny).

Okay okay easier as in less smarts needed to do it, but in terms of sheer laziness neither of those trump the concept of:overhearing someone mention TPB in person or on a forum like you just didvisit the site and learn you need a piece of freeware to use it, download said freeware.permanent & instant access to the internet's finest stolen goods, as quick to use as your internet connection.(elapsed time: 5-10 minutes for a savvy user who likely already did this when they were 12, maybe a half hour for an unsavvy user and depending on how fast they realize they have to DL the MacOS versions of everything)

On the note of laziness I think the online game purchase companies managed to get me because unlike some seeds they always had awesome download speeds and I didn't have to fret about with crap like patches vs cracks for them and all the rest of the song & dance around skirting newer forms of DRM. Laziness for the win :P

not to mention with TPB you have to worry about being hassled by your ISP.

The depressing results of its own game's day one piracy rates show that only 6.4% of people playing the game bought it legitimately.

Jesus Christ and people wonder why crippling DRM is included in PC games

No no, see, it's not the players fault. They're only pirating the game because of how terrible it is! Or they can't afford $50 because their mom is having surgery! Or they just wanted to try it out for 90 hours to be sure they really liked it! Or they're just making a political statement because the developer once thought about using a publisher who has a benefits person in their HR department who was mean to a barista one time!

Piracy is NEVER the players fault. I mean, what do you expect them to do, make informed choices about their entertainment media purchases with their limited finances, then adjust their future purchases accordingly based on their enjoyment of the game? That might mean that a player would have to *GASP* not play some games! Or even worse, wait to play certain games until they can afford to purchase them!

I have a game on the Android App store and it's heartbreaking to see every new version I post end up on a torrent sit in a matter of hours. My sales in the Google Play store were good for awhile but once the cracked version hit, it slowed to a fraction of what it was. Sales in the other stores are all still good, thankfully.

Vaneshi:So a game that isn't on Steam (the single largest PC game distributor) has a low number of paying customers?

I'm shocked, shocked by this news. I'm also equally shocked that someone expected people to pay for yet-another-crappy tycoon game that you'd swear was shiat out of some "Tycoon toolkit" because there are a plethora of equally shiat tycoon games that have appeared recently.

Perhaps this guy needs to go talk to the two who made Space, Pirates and Zombies. They'll tell you a lovely tale about Impulse vs Steam and how that correlates to both piracy and number of sales, the 'tldr' being: Get you game on Steam before biatching about either.

BumpInTheNight:Wait, I take back my comment about how they deserve to be pirated by not releasing a demo, if you visit their real site they have a link that mentions a demo is available...but when you go to try it:

The page you are looking for is temporarily unavailable.Please try again later.

...so they're stealing from EA's playbook it seems. Clever lads, this is surely to get the results they're after.

Is it my fault their method of legit purchase is poorly thought out and can't handle the attention they've brought upon themselves? Nope, all I see is an EA-like "We apologize for how popular we are, but we're not going to fix things because that costs money but you haven't given us enough of yours yet." If only they used a proper online distributor, one that could handle the crush of a kockatu article mention. I'm sure such a thing is just vapor and steam though.

The depressing results of its own game's day one piracy rates show that only 6.4% of people playing the game bought it legitimately.

Jesus Christ and people wonder why crippling DRM is included in PC games

No no, see, it's not the players fault. They're only pirating the game because of how terrible it is! Or they can't afford $50 because their mom is having surgery! Or they just wanted to try it out for 90 hours to be sure they really liked it! Or they're just making a political statement because the developer once thought about using a publisher who has a benefits person in their HR department who was mean to a barista one time!

Piracy is NEVER the players fault. I mean, what do you expect them to do, make informed choices about their entertainment media purchases with their limited finances, then adjust their future purchases accordingly based on their enjoyment of the game? That might mean that a player would have to *GASP* not play some games! Or even worse, wait to play certain games until they can afford to purchase them!

I don't think it's possible to make an informed choice. Reviews are horseshiat. An 8/10 is a bad game. Kotaku has seriously condensed reviews down to YES or NO. Trailers are 5-10% gameplay and demos are few and far between because it shows what a shiatty game they made or what a shiatty demo they made.

Pirates are just apathetic. If the game sucks they will stop playing it, rather than punishing themselves for 15 more hours like I did with the garbage that is assassins creed 3.

scottydoesntknow:I never heard of the game or its studio. I've heard of Pirate Bay. If I see a game at the top of the download list, but have never heard of it or its studio, downloading the game to try it out is pretty common, especially when it's the developers that put it on there. But if gameplay is crippled by an intentional bug (and I'm given no clue that the bug exists on purpose), I'll either assume the same bug exists on the retail copy and not purchase it, or assume the developers were being dicks and not purchase it. Plus there's no way to know if that 6.4% actually pirated it first before purchasing.

Just statistics:"Try Before you Buy" - Just an Excuse to Steal?However, the most interesting finding was the one where the "try before you buy" mentality was exposed as being a myth. Despite jailbreakers' claims that the need to "demo" an app is among their top reasons for pirating, Pinch Media found that this simply wasn't the case. To test this, they set a baseline for typical conversion rates of legitimate "lite" to paid applications and found that the conversion rate there is 7.4%. That means about 1 in 14 who try the "lite" version go on to purchase the paid version. However, among the pirate community, pirated-to-legitimate conversions are 0.43%. That's only 1 in about 233 installations. In other words, few users of pirated apps are truly "trying before they buy," they're just trying.

scottydoesntknow:Estimates are that it's around a 70% piracy rate, but Notch doesn't care at all. Those 30% are more important to him. And he's still making money hand over fist.

The idea that every pirated copy is a lost sale is deeply misleading. It creates a sense of loss when no actual loss has actually occurred. Companies would be better served focusing on the sales they can make.

I refuse to set up a Windows partition, so I only pirate software that isn't released for my OS. Generally, the fan-made WineSkin ports are pretty reliable, or have minor, but predictable bugs.

Most popular game in the universe for most of the 90s. EVERYBODY had the shareware version. The full version and DOOM2 were probably the most pirated software in the world from '93 to '96. No copy protection at ALL - got four or five floppy discs? ARJ that sucker up and have fun!

Yet id still made an unholy assload of money off it.

Piracy hurts, sure, but it doesn't kill.

/Man, I'm having flashbacks to the ASCII loading screens for some reason...

I bought a copy of that game on CD in a local computer store. Found out later that they never made a CD version of the game. you'd never know it. CD came in a box with professional looking instruction manual and CD with graphics from the game printed on it just like it was from the manufacturer. I talked to the people at the store about it later and they said they bought them from a distributor not realizing that they were illegal copies. I still have it somewhere.

physt:I have a game on the Android App store and it's heartbreaking to see every new version I post end up on a torrent sit in a matter of hours. My sales in the Google Play store were good for awhile but once the cracked version hit, it slowed to a fraction of what it was. Sales in the other stores are all still good, thankfully.

So what you're saying is that your sales are good for the first few hours ("a matter of hours")? If you're not a major blockbuster with people knocking down your door for the next version, I somehow doubt that you'll even be noticed by a lot of people within your first month.

So, just for reference and a self-plug, what game(s) have you released?

moothemagiccow:I don't think it's possible to make an informed choice. Reviews are horseshiat. An 8/10 is a bad game. Kotaku has seriously condensed reviews down to YES or NO. Trailers are 5-10% gameplay and demos are few and far between because it shows what a shiatty game they made or what a shiatty demo they made.

If only there was some kind of shared medium, accessible by thousands of gamers around the world, using various forums to express their opinions on recently released video games.

1) It's the first day, and they "Zero-Day" released the alternate version as a pirate release. It's very possible more people were exposed to it on release day through scene pre- sites than they did through normal channels.2) While this is actually a list of the people who PLAYED the alternate vs. purchased copies of the game, it doesn't represent the number of people who downloaded, but did not play the game (aka The Collectors), likewise, it also doesn't count people who purchased the game, but have not played it yet (like 90% of the games in my Steam library, LOL)3) This chart will get far worse, as the news gets out - but how much of that will be "I just have to play the 'fake-cracked' version to see this!" versus actual pirates?

On the other hand, they are getting some great publicity. Publicity is everything.... if I had the sort of publicity they are getting for my iOS/Android Virtual Cat Toy app, I'd probably see thousands of downloads the next day - They'll probably see a 10x bump in sales for the next week or so as this story continues to get press. Let's hope it gets decent ratings.

It is an interesting take. Madonna released one of her albums on the torrents with some sort of annoying recurring noise in every song. Some games have stealth piracy detection routines (usually checking the hash of the launcher) that introduce impossible enemies after a number of levels and such.

It might serve them better if after the piracy event pops up, they labeled the bottom of the game with "Special Pirate Edition Downloaded from PirateBay" to let downloaders know they've been had, but this will certainly give them a nice boost they wouldn't have had otherwise.

jayhawk88:moothemagiccow: I don't think it's possible to make an informed choice. Reviews are horseshiat. An 8/10 is a bad game. Kotaku has seriously condensed reviews down to YES or NO. Trailers are 5-10% gameplay and demos are few and far between because it shows what a shiatty game they made or what a shiatty demo they made.

If only there was some kind of shared medium, accessible by thousands of gamers around the world, using various forums to express their opinions on recently released video games.

And you don't think the larger ones are moderated by those in the employ of the companies being bribed to praise the game?

SleepingEye:physt: I have a game on the Android App store and it's heartbreaking to see every new version I post end up on a torrent sit in a matter of hours. My sales in the Google Play store were good for awhile but once the cracked version hit, it slowed to a fraction of what it was. Sales in the other stores are all still good, thankfully.

So what you're saying is that your sales are good for the first few hours ("a matter of hours")? If you're not a major blockbuster with people knocking down your door for the next version, I somehow doubt that you'll even be noticed by a lot of people within your first month.

So, just for reference and a self-plug, what game(s) have you released?

I worded that poorly. Sales on the Google Play Store were good for months and then the game started to show up in the torrents, at which point, the sales fell. Now, whenever I upload a new update, the pirated version is up in a matter of hours. I was thinking that releasing frequent updates with new features and add ons would encourage someone to buy it so they could get updates.

Number of games I pirated before Steam: most of the ones I wanted to playNumber of games I pirated since Steam: Zero. None. Nada.Number of games I bought on steam sales for $5: ALL OF THE DAMN THINGS

Make your content available easily and cheaply, and people will throw money at you rather than go through the hassles of piracy.

/I'm up to Fallout New Vegas now. Should get to games from 2012 by the end of the year.

THIS (Except I can't recall if I had the shareware version of doom or a pirated version).

I did make images of legal copies of games requiring a CD key so I could play without swapping out the CD.

Freakin' Steam. I've spent at least $100 on games I haven't installed and will never play (and $10 on hats). My more recent major purchases have been set up under separate logins so I could theoretically sell them if I chose to. I wanted to buy a 'used' copy of the latest Diablo before it was clear it wasn't any better than the demo version. Also: Games need to be available to play offline.

moothemagiccow:I don't think it's possible to make an informed choice. Reviews are horseshiat. An 8/10 is a bad game. Kotaku has seriously condensed reviews down to YES or NO. Trailers are 5-10% gameplay and demos are few and far between because it shows what a shiatty game they made or what a shiatty demo they made.

Pirates are just apathetic. If the game sucks they will stop playing it, rather than punishing themselves for 15 more hours like I did with the garbage that is assassins creed 3.

You know, that's a strong reason for why I rarely buy games at release or pre-order any more, ESPECIALLY first person shooters. Reviews and past history of the developer seem to be meaningless for a lot of the industry. SteamMetaScore seems fairly accurate generally, but the biggest factor for me lately has been to look at who on my Steam friends list have bought/played the game and ask 'em.

t3knomanser:scottydoesntknow: Estimates are that it's around a 70% piracy rate, but Notch doesn't care at all. Those 30% are more important to him. And he's still making money hand over fist.

The idea that every pirated copy is a lost sale is deeply misleading. It creates a sense of loss when no actual loss has actually occurred. Companies would be better served focusing on the sales they can make.

I refuse to set up a Windows partition, so I only pirate software that isn't released for my OS. Generally, the fan-made WineSkin ports are pretty reliable, or have minor, but predictable bugs.

Virtual machines work well for games if you have an awesome system. I can run GTAIV in Parallels (Parallels is a commercial virtual machine product for OS X) at medium settings without stuttering.